QoE-Based Low-Delay Live Streaming Using Throughput Predictions

Recently, HTTP-based adaptive streaming has become the de facto standard for video streaming over the Internet. It allows clients to dynamically adapt media characteristics to network conditions in order to ensure a high quality of experience, that is, minimize playback interruptions, while maximizing video quality at a reasonable level of quality changes. In the case of live streaming, this task becomes particularly challenging due to the latency constraints. The challenge further increases if a client uses a wireless network, where the throughput is subject to considerable fluctuations. Consequently, live streams often exhibit latencies of up to 30 seconds. In the present work, we introduce an adaptation algorithm for HTTP-based live streaming called LOLYPOP (Low-Latency Prediction-Based Adaptation) that is designed to operate with a transport latency of few seconds. To reach this goal, LOLYPOP leverages TCP throughput predictions on multiple time scales, from 1 to 10 seconds, along with an estimate of the prediction error distribution. In addition to satisfying the latency constraint, the algorithm heuristically maximizes the quality of experience by maximizing the average video quality as a function of the number of skipped segments and quality transitions. In order to select an efficient prediction method, we studied the performance of several time series prediction methods in IEEE 802.11 wireless access networks. We evaluated LOLYPOP under a large set of experimental conditions limiting the transport latency to 3 seconds, against a state-of-the-art adaptation algorithm from the literature, called FESTIVE. We observed that the average video quality is by up to a factor of 3 higher than with FESTIVE. We also observed that LOLYPOP is able to reach a broader region in the quality of experience space, and thus it is better adjustable to the user profile or service provider requirements.Comment: Technical Report TKN-16-001, Telecommunication Networks Group, Technische Universitaet Berlin. This TR updated TR TKN-15-00

Approximation of regression-based fault minimization for network traffic

This research associates three distinct approaches for computer network traffic prediction. They are the traditional stochastic gradient descent (SGD) using a few random samplings instead of the complete dataset for each iterative calculation, the gradient descent algorithm (GDA) which is a well-known optimization approach in Deep Learning, and the proposed method. The network traffic is computed from the traffic load (data and multimedia) of the computer network nodes via the Internet. It is apparent that the SGD is a modest iteration but can conclude suboptimal solutions. The GDA is a complicated one, can function more accurate than the SGD but difficult to manipulate parameters, such as the learning rate, the dataset granularity, and the loss function. Network traffic estimation helps improve performance and lower costs for various applications, such as an adaptive rate control, load balancing, the quality of service (QoS), fair bandwidth allocation, and anomaly detection. The proposed method confirms optimal values out of parameters using simulation to compute the minimum figure of specified loss function in each iteration